UK Print Media “not dead” shocker: Peter Kirwan

The latest issue of Peter Kirwan’s FullRun newsletter is bursting at the seams with good material.

However, his piece on the audience breakdown of leading UK national newspaper websites really does have some big implications for PR (sub required – so get one).

The thrust of the argument is that the unique readerships of most of the top UK national newspaper websites are actually less than their print equivalents. In other words, print isn’t dead by a long shot – and everyone questioning whether print media is still worth targetting ought to think again.

I hope Peter doesn’t mind me quoting the following at length – this is something that deserves to be discussed far and wide.

"Neil Thurman of City University has tapped up NielsenNetRatings for data on how many US readers visit the major UK nationals’ sites each month as a proportion of total unique users. Here’swhat he found:* Independent.co.uk: 73%* TheSun.co.uk: 42%* TimesOnline.co.uk: 41%* FT.com: 39%* Guardian.co.uk: 39%* ThisIsLondon.co.uk: 33%* Telegraph.co.uk: 28%* DailyMail.co.uk: 11%

It seems fairly clear that most of the UK nationals receive between 30% and 40% of their unique visits from the US.

That’s higher than the numbers revealed by the Times and the Sunday Timesnearly a decade ago. Factor in traffic from the Rest Of The World, and theproportion of non-UK traffic arriving at UK news sites on a regular basiscould be as high as 60%-70% of unique visitors.

In the case of tech-focused sites, which carry a large amount of whatmight be described as globalized news, the proportion could be evenhigher.

For PRs based in the UK, the implications are interesting. To tease themout, it’s worth taking a look at a recent column written for Press Gazetteby John Duncan, a former managing editor of the Observer.Duncan argues that "every single British national newspaper website stillhas a lower audience in the UK than the newspaper it is supposedlykilling".

The claim will sound discordant to anyone who has bought into webtriumphalism. But in the case of the Guardian — the UK’s best-traffickednewspaper site — Duncan is able to demonstrate it convincingly.Duncan argues that only 34% of the unique users who visit GuardianUnlimited originate in the UK — a figure that sits well with NeilThurman’s data.

On this basis, he suggests, Guardian Unlimited attracts 270,576 UK-basedunique users on a daily basis. By contrast, the Guardian’s print editionsells 20,000 copies *more* than that on an average day.If you take print readership — not just circulation — into account, thedisparity grows even larger. According to the National Readership Survey,the Guardian’s print edition attracts an average daily readership of986,586. That’s almost four times the size of what we might describe asGuardian Unlimited’s audience of UK-based unique users.

The dynamics won’t be different for any of the Guardian’s rivals. And itseems reasonable to suggest that similar principles apply to UK-based B2Band consumer tech publications.

These days, it’s becoming fashionable for tech PR agencies to quietlycriticize clients who display a continuing preference for print-basedcoverage. But if Thurman and Duncan are correct, it’s hard to criticizeanyone who thinks that print still plays a major role in influencingbuyers and significant others.

The bottom line is that PR professionals working in the UK are paid to gettheir messages in front of a UK-based target audience. In many cases, printremains a highly efficient way of doing just that.

Why the LinkedIn Insight Tag is a huge free bonus for B2B marketing

Andrew Smith August 8, 2018

The LinkedIn Insight Tag - have you installed it on your website?Have you even heard of it?
If not (and you are involved in any way with B2B marketing or PR), you are denying yourself a lot of insight about LinkedIn members who visit your web property. In fact, any organisation that would like to know more about the type and kind of professional person visiting their site can benefit from the Insight Tag.
So what